But with a sadly proud gesture of refusal he said, Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes.

He clears his throat and shifts it into neutral. Gives a slow exploratory draw on the starter.

When it argues, hauls back from the shoulder and turns into what passes there for open water.

The boat takes you shopping for ketchup and cereal. If the shack at the gas pump had a decent selection

of reading material, a man could avoid buying Playboyjust for the articles.

Mr. Dialect conserves like a master tactician the best of his Parisian shirts:

to the village launderette hefts a garbage bag. At the jump from washer

to dryer nets each one-hundred-percent remnant in the sack,

shouldering them back to the houseboat and pats their sleeves onto wire hangers—

eaves of the Never Betterseized by a flock of pastel bats.

My Paris shirts, the famous dead, hang cuff to cuff in the hanging locker, press for a puff from the hand steamer, a Tuesday promenade in Honey Harbour, the light down to a stub of ash on the top deck, its fibreglass warm and bumpy as the retrospect, some Rémy, Ritz crackers, and the usual come-ons from stars overhead.

The sky now kindling for him alone at five in the morning, Mr. Dialect will rise let’s say most days (there are no others) with an air of dressing to breakfast beside a caramel brunette, her taste in shoes unswervingly superb. It’s not among the things he learns to tire of such blessings.

A set of rocks like mountaintops whose mountainflanks are plunged in a body of water.

Down in the valleys astronauts water rhododendron pots, their faces sealed in Mason jars.

To floss their teeth or make some calls they climb the rungs of a ladder underwater and drag themselves over a boulder.

When the voices start confiding their Christian names as I’m rinsing plates on the Never

then it’s time to haul anchor, wait in a dive in Parry Sound, and buy a round for whoever won’t be a stranger.

Should a drink materialize you didn’t order, make eyes at the girl who didn’t send it, as I’d have done.